Bulgarian businessman Emilian Gebrev. Photo from Capital.bg, used with permission

French actor Gerard Depardieu boasting a freshly issued Russian passport; issuing authority 770001 highlighted

Passports allegedly issued by Unit 770001 in a series during 2015

Passports allegedly issued by Unit 770001 in 2017

Wagner PMC training camp near Molkino, DigitalGlobe satellite photo

Col. Ivannikov travelled from Moscow to Pashkovskiy at least three times in 2014. No other domestic air travel records exist for him in this period among the public leaked records we reviewed.

Wagner CEO Dmitriy Uktin took at least 7 flights between St. Petersburg and Pashkovskiy airport in 2014 and 2015. The only other destination he flew to was Rostov, one of the largest Russian cities near the Ukraine border.

Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified as Denis Sergeev, High-Ranking GRU Officer

February 14, 2019

By Moritz Rakuszitzky

Translations: Русский

Bellingcat previously confirmed that a third GRU officer was present in the UK during the time Sergey and Yulia Skripal fell into a coma, after what the UK authorities said was a deliberate poisoning with Novichok. In addition, Bellingcat established that this same officer traveled multiple times to Bulgaria during 2015, including a trip days before a Bulgarian arms trader and his son were severely poisoned with a yet-unidentified poison.

Following a four-month joint investigation with our investigative partners The Insider (Russia) and Respekt (Czechia), Bellingcat can now reveal the true identity and background of this GRU officer, who operated internationally under the cover persona of Sergey Vyachaeslavovich Fedotov. In fact, this person is Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev, a high-ranking GRU officer and a graduate of Russia’s Military Diplomatic Academy.

Additional research in this investigation was also made by newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (Finland).

Notably, we have established that in the last two months, Russian authorities have taken the unusual measure of erasing any public records of the existence of Denis Sergeev, as well as of Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the main two suspects in the Skripal poisoning. These unprecedented actions cannot plausibly be taken without direct involvement of the Russian state, and add further credibility to the UK government’s assertion that the Skripal poisoning operation, and the subsequent cover-up, were coordinated at a state level. Additional details on these concerted efforts to purge public records of Chepiga, Mishkin, and Sergeev’s identities will be detailed in the next part of our investigation, scheduled to come out next week.

Who is Denis Sergeev?

Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev was born in Usharal, a small militarized town in what was at the time Soviet Kazakhstan, near the Soviet-China border. Both Denis Sergeev and his cover identity “Sergey Fedotov” were born on 17 September 1973. He served in the army in the southern Russian city of Novorossiisk in the Krasnodar Region.

At some point between 2000 and 2002, he was transferred to Moscow and enrolled at the elite Military Diplomatic Academy, popularly known in Russia as the “GRU Conservatory”. The Military Diplomatic Academy churns out 100 elite intelligence officers each year, ranging from spies in diplomatic and military attache covers to illegals.

We have not established what Denis Sergeev’s service prior to the Academy involved; however, it is known that recruitment into the Academy takes place among military officers with the minimum rank of captain who have excelled at their military service, traditionally in Spetsnaz or navy units. Like all other graduates, Sergeev would have finished the Academy with a minimum rank of lieutenant-colonel. While we have no confirmation of his current military rank, the time served and the nature of his assignments since graduation indicate he currently holds a minimum rank of full colonel, and possibly major-general.

Denis Sergeev is married and has an adult daughter.

2004 to 2012 Period

During this period, which possibly overlapped with his last years at the Military Diplomatic Academy, Denis Sergeev, under his real identity, served as shareholder and/or managing director of eight Russian companies. These companies, all of which were liquidated between 2007 and 2012, were sham corporations with names mimicking names of other large companies registered in Russia. In most of the companies, Sergeev was the sole shareholder, while in two he was co-shareholder with other people, some of whom we also identified as GRU officers.

We established that during 2009, Denis Sergeev obtained a personal loan from a Russian bank in the amount of just over one million USD. The allocation of such a large loan to a person who – as seen from his credit record (obtained from a leaked Russian credit history collection) – had no real estate and no personal vehicle – is extraordinary.  The loan appears to have been extended on the strength of Denis Sergeev’s personal income in his declared role as “specialist” working for a company called Loreven Style Ltd specializing in consulting services.

In a 2010 census, Sergeev listed Loreven Style Ltd as his employer, and indicated a Riga-based company address. There are no records of a company with such name ever existing, either in Riga or anywhere. Two phone numbers listed as contacts are not in service.

It is not certain what the function of the many sham companies incorporated by Sergeev was, and whether it was linked to the loan amount of $1 million apparently obtained from a Russian bank. A review of some of the other shareholders in these companies  – some of which also with GRU links – shows that they too incorporated dozens of companies with similar profiles, all of which have since been liquidated. It is plausible that these companies may have been used for money laundering purposes, or as cover corporations providing “respectable employment” to other GRU undercover officers, for instance in the context of visa applications. Bellingcat will continue to investigate these companies’ purpose and potential use by the GRU within or outside Russia.

The Birth of Sergey Fedotov

In 2010, Denis Sergeev received his alter ego, “Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov”. A new, valid passport was issued under this name, by the same “770001” passport desk in Moscow that issued cover passports to Mishkin, Chepiga other GRU operatives, and “VIP” citizens, as previously detailed by Bellingcat.

“Fedotov” was given a birth date matching the one of the actual person Denis Sergeev. His place of birth was moved from Kazakhstan to the village of Apushka in the Ryazan region of Russia. As in the case of the other undercover passports issued to Mishkin and Chepiga, the “reason” for issuance of the new passport was stated as “unsuitability for use” of the previous passport. As in the other cases, the previous passport listed never actually existed.

“Sergey Fedotov” was also assigned a residential address and an employer. The new Moscow address in fact belonged to an unrelated family bearing the same family name (we were unable to contact the family to find out if they were aware of their cohabitation with the GRU officer, due to the fact that all four of their phone numbers were disconnected).

The employer, listed as a company called “Business-Courier”, could not be established definitively. There are more than 25 Russian companies that carry or had this name, including ones that were liquidated in the same period as the batch in which Denis Sergeev was a shareholder.

In a 2017 census, “Sergey Fedotov” listed his income as the equivalent of USD $1000 per month. He did not list an employer in this census.

An International Man of Mystery

Using four different airline booking, PNR, and border-crossing databases, Bellingcat has collated and analyzed travel records for the persona “Sergey Fedotov” for the period of 2012-2018. He used two different (consecutive) passports during this period–both of which were issued by the same 770001 passport desk and had numbers from batches that we have identified to include other GRU undercover officers.

Fedotov’s itinerary shows extensive travel to destinations across Western and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.  In the period of 2012-2013, his destinations included Ukraine and Tajikistan.

In 2014, Fedotov traveled to Czechia, Italy, and Switzerland. Notably, during his first trip to Prague at the end of January 2014, he traveled alongside “Alexander Petrov”, the cover persona of Dr. Alexander Mishkin, one of the key suspects in the Skripal poisonings. The two stayed in Prague eight days, until 2 February 2014, when they flew back to Moscow. Bellingcat’s investigative partner Respekt has established that during this trip, “Fedotov” and “Petrov” stayed at the four-star Best Western Meteor Plaza Hotel, where they shared a room.

“Fedotov” made two subsequent trips to Western Europe during the rest of 2014, visiting Milan, Geneva, and Paris. His last trip that year was from 12 November to 1 December 2014, when he traveled to and from Paris.

Bulgarian Events

In February 2015, Fedotov made his first trip to Bulgaria. On 15 February 2015 he flew from Moscow to Belgrade in neighboring Serbia. On the next day he traveled on to Bulgaria, and stayed there until February 22, when he flew back from Sofia to Moscow.

His second trip, which was previously reported by Bellingcat, was in April 2015. He landed in the seaside resort of Burgas on a direct flight from Moscow on 24 April 2015. While he had bought a return flight from Sofia to Moscow on 30 April 2015, he did not use that ticket. Instead, on the evening of April 28 at 20:20, he flew from Sofia to Istanbul, where he bought an onward ticket to Moscow that same night.

It was earlier that same day, April 28, that the Bulgarian arms manufacturer and trader Emilian Gebrev collapsed during a dinner event with his trading partners from Poland at an upscale Sofia restaurant. Mr. Gebrev’s health deteriorated fast and he slipped into a coma. He was treated for poisoning from an unidentified substance at the Military Medical Hospital in Sofia. A source from the medial institution who wished to remain anonymous confirmed to Bellingcat and its investigative partners that Mr. Gebrev’s state was “touch and go” for over two weeks, with his chances of survival at times deemed to be very low. Gebrev’s son and the commercial director of one of his manufacturing companies also fell ill with signs of poisoning in the days following his own collapse, albeit with lesser symptoms.

Following his release from hospital, and given that the poison had not been identified, Emilian Gebrev requested a forensic medical analysis from two European labs accredited by the OPCW. One of them – the Helsinki-based Verifin – conducted a detailed analysis on urine samples from Mr. Gebrev and his son. As previously reported, this analysis found traces of organo-phospate poisoning, with two distinct types of agent discovered in the sample of Patient 1, who is presumed to be Mr. Gebrev. One of the types was broadly identified by Verifin as a pesticide, while the other was not identified.

In a statement to the press on 11 February 2019 in the wake of Bellingcat’s first publication pinpointing “Fedotov”‘s presence in Buglaria during the time of Gebrev’s poisoning, Bulgaria’s General Prosecutor confirmed Fedotov’s concurrent presence in the country. He also confirmed that Bulgarian authorities have re-opened investigation into Gebrev’s 2015 poisoning, which had been closed in 2016 when no suspect had been identified. Mr. Tzatzarov said that the investigation had been reopened after Mr. Gebrev had written to the prosecutors in October 2018, having seen coverage of the Novichok poisonings in the UK and suspecting he may have been targeted in similar circumstances. Mr. Tzatzarov also confirmed that Bulgarian and UK law enforcement had been cooperating on the case since October 2018. He, however, appeared to discount the hypothesis that the 2015 poisonings in Bulgaria may have been linked to poisoning agents of the Novichok family, which he substantiated with the fact that “no chemicals in the CWC (Convention of Chemical Weapons) lists of banned substances were found in extensive testing”.

Bellingcat and its reporting partners approached several experts on chemical weapons for further comments on the possible poison used in Bulgaria, based on the symptoms described and the full report from Verifin.

All consulted experts, including Vil Mirzyanov, who worked on the development of Novichok as part of the Soviet Unioin’s secret chemical weapons program, concurred that the Verifin report cannot conclusively prove or disprove whether Novichok, or a similar substance, was used in the poisoning of Mr. Gebrev. Speaking to Bellingcat, Mr. Mirzyanov said that standard OPCW-standard compliant tests like the analysis conducted by Verifin are not suited to identify the use of Novichok, which is not а part of the banned list of substances under the CWC. Mr. Mirzyanov confirmed that a repeat test by the same laboratory, targeted specifically at the possible metabolysed traces and artifacts left by Novichok poisoning, is likely to prove or disprove the Novichok theory.

Verifin has confirmed to our reporting partner Helsingin Sanomat that it holds patient samples for a minimum of five years, which would mean that Mr. Gebrev’s samples are available for re-testing at least until June 2020. Verifin has confirmed to the reporting team that if requested by the patient, a custom-tailored analysis could be performed.

“Fedotov” returned to Sofia on a direct flight from Moscow once more, on 23 May 2015. He left the country on 29 May 2015 by car, crossing into Serbia in the company of two Russian citizens. According to sources in Bulgarian law enforcement interviewed by our reporting partner in Bulgaria, Capital.bg, one of the two companions had been present in London during the poisoning of the Skripals in March 2018. Fedotov flew from Belgrade to Moscow on the next day, 30 May 2015. This return visit to Bulgaria broadly coincided with Mr. Gebrev’s release from hospital, and subsequent reentry with renewed poisoning symptoms.

2016 and 2017 Hotspots

Following his Bulgaria trips, Fedotov made one more trip five-day trip to Turkey in August 2015.

During 2016, he traveled to London twice. His first visit was at the end of March, and he stayed in London six days until 1 April 2016. He returned to London for a four-day visit on 14 July 2016. Notably, or perhaps entirely coincidentally, these two trips were shortly before and after the Brexit referendum.

On 5 November 2016, Fedotov flew to Barcelona, and left back to Moscow from Zurich six days later. He returned to Barcelona one more time: on 29 September 2017, two days before the Catalunya independence referendum. Once again, by coincidence or otherwise, Fedotov remained in Spain during the October 1 vote, and flew back via Geneva to Moscow on 9 October 2017. He flew back to Geneva one more time three weeks later, on October 30, and returned to Moscow on 8 November 2017.

The Skripal Poisoning

At the end of 2017, Fedotov took a trip to Armenia. He stayed there between 23 December and 2 January 2018.  Only a week later, he flew to Zurich on January 10 and returned from Geneva on 17 January 2018. This would be his last trip before the London visit during which the Skripals were poisoned.

Traveling as “Fedotov”, Denis Sergeev arrived in London early in the morning of 2 March 2018, leaving Moscow at 7:00 on Aeroflot flight SU 2580. The other two suspects, Mishkin and Chepiga, would arrive on a later flight that afternoon.

It is unclear what Fedotov’s role may have been, if any, in the preparation and execution of the poisoning operation. We could also not establish if he traveled to Salisbury on any of the days he was in the UK. He had booked a return flight on Aeroflot’s SU 2579

from Heathrow to Moscow in the afternoon of March 4, the day on which Sergey and Yuliya Skripal collapsed unconscious.

However, he never boarded that flight. PNR records seen by Bellingcat and its investigative partners show that despite checking in to that flight around noon on March 4, “Fedotov” was a last minute no-show. Instead, using transportation that has yet to be identified by us, he made his way to Rome, and boarded a flight at 15:30 that same day back to Moscow.

In the next part, set to be published next week, we will detail how we identified Denis Sergeev, despite concerted efforts by Russian authorities to purge all public records of him and the two Skripal poisoners, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.

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Moritz Rakuszitzky

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34 Comments

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1. Dmitry - February 15, 2019

Billing at guys, you are really stupid… UFMS 770001 just mean that passport issued not by territory FMS but any ex-territory service – like commercial passport-visa services, group passport issue, etc. For example my son and my wife have passports used by this FMS because I want to receive passport in 1 week instead 4-5 as in normal FMS. Are you think that 5-years child can work for FSB?! You need to check your sources more carefully! This number just mean that passport issued by centralized FMS structure instead territory depended.

If you ask MFA for ordinary passport issue it also will be issues by this FMS from MFA-dedicated passport number allocation.

Reply

- Black Star - February 15, 2019

“Billing at”

You meant to write “Bellingcat”, but your spelling got “corrected”. Obviously you are new to this thing since your computer has not yet learned this word ??

Do not waste any more of your time at trying to deny the already proven, it is useless trolling.

Reply

2. RobS - February 15, 2019

Your team of journalists are absolutely some of the best in the field of investigative journalism, reading your articles are like reading a spy novel where the twists just keep on adding up.

If there is any way I could help, please dont hessitate to ask.

Reply

3. Mischa - February 15, 2019

Can’t wait for further analysis of Bulgarian substance/poison.

Reply

4. maarten_nl - February 15, 2019

Nice find, but it is not open source research.

“PNR records seen by Bellingcat and its research partners”

BC & partners do not have legal permission to see/digging in PNR records.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/fight-against-terrorism/passenger-name-record/?fbclid=IwAR0nTpxh8eKHD1wACiOhyXxjm7HNnoKiZJD0wBwRJe-QlTO9U_XaV1BMdAk

Reply

5. Anonymous - February 15, 2019

Typo in 6th last paragraph line 4, *again

Reply

- Aric Toler - February 15, 2019

Thanks, fixed

Reply

6. Mr. Robert from Rome - February 15, 2019

Gentlemen, please forgive my English I only know how to use google translator so I hope to be a good one. My question is this: how do you tell and say that Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr. Alexander Mishkin were two tourists visiting the city of Salisbury? It’s one of the biggest stupid things I’ve ever heard. Who would leave Russia in March to visit Salisbury, one of the ugliest cities in Britain? in March you do not even go to visit Venice which is another thing, right? I would like to ask you, to which travel agency have these two Russian tourists turned? Did you understand me?

Third Skripal Suspect Linked to 2015 Bulgaria Poisoning

February 7, 2019

By Bellingcat Investigation Team

Translations: Русский

Bellingcat has determined that a third Russian GRU officer, who was in the United Kingdom at the time of the Skripals’ Novichok poisoning in March 2018, arrived in Bulgaria just days before a local entrepreneur and his son became seriously ill after being poisoned with an unidentified substance.

The third man, a 45-year-old Russian travelling under the alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov, has been conclusively identified by Bellingcat as a senior GRU officer. Like the other two Skripal suspects, GRU officers Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, his cover identity was created in 2010, with no prior records of a person with this name ever existing.

Sergey Fedotov was first identified as a person of interest by the Russian news outlet Fontanka.

Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider (Russia) have traced Fedotov’s prodigious travel itinerary since his cover identity was created in 2010 until his last overseas trip to London in March 2018. Over these eight years, “Fedotov” traveled extensively in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, often appearing in hot spots just days before news-making events.

A trip taken by Fedotov to Bulgaria in April 2015, however, stands out due to its eerie resemblance to the circumstances around the Skripals’ poisoning in March 2018.

On April 24, 2015, “Sergey Fedotov” arrived on a flight from Moscow to the Bulgarian seaside resort of Burgas. He had a return flight for a week later, on April 30, from the capital city of Sofia back to Moscow. However, he did not show up for the return flight. Instead, late on the evening of April 28th, he showed up at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport and bought a last-minute ticket to a flight to Moscow.

Earlier that day, a Bulgarian entrepreneur, Emilian Gebrev, was hospitalized after collapsing at a reception he was hosting in Sofia. At around the same time, his adult son and one of the executives at his company fell suddenly ill. All three were hospitalized with symptoms of severe poisoning. Emilian Gebrev’s condition quickly deteriorated and he fell into a coma. Doctors surmised that the poison had been applied or consumed in the day or days preceding April 28. However, as they could not identify the poison, they could not be sure of its effects or mode of progression.

As first reported by Bulgarian weekly Capital, Emilian Gebrev then requested assistance in identifying the poison from two leading laboratories specializing in control of chemical weapons. One of them, Verifin at the University of Helsinki, undertook a thorough analysis. The lab was unable to identify the poison conclusively, but discovered traces of two different organophosphates in Mr. Gebrev’s urine sample: One of these they managed to identify as a strong pesticide, while the other remained unidentifiable with the standard testing tools for chemical weapons.

A month after initially being admitted to hospital, Emilian Gebrev’s status improved substantially and he was released. He told Bellingcat that several days later, in late May, he felt ill once again and was re-admitted to hospital.

Notably, on May 24, 2015 “Sergey Fedotov” had returned to Bulgaria on a direct flight from Moscow. He had booked a return flight on May 28, 2015, however he, once again, did not show up for that flight. Two days later, on May 30, he took a flight from neighboring Serbia to Moscow.

The events surrounding “Sergey Fedotov”’s trips to Bulgaria closely match the pattern of his trip to and from the United Kingdom at the time of the Skripal poisoning. Fedotov arrived to London on a flight from Moscow on the same day as the other two GRU officers — these would be Col. Chepiga and Dr. Mishkin — albeit on a different flight. He was scheduled to fly back in the afternoon of March 4, 2018, the day on which the Skripals, both father and daughter, fell ill in Salisbury. However, like in Bulgaria, he did not take the return flight, checking himself out of the airplane several minutes before departure time. Instead, he flew back to Moscow from another European capital a few days later.

Asked if he knew why he might be targeted by the GRU, Mr. Gebrev was at a loss.  One of Bulgaria’s leading entrepreneurs in the defense manufacturing and export industry, he said he could not imagine what might have angered a foreign security agency enough to go after him and his family. At the same time, he admitted that this was most plausible explanation to a an unresolved mystery, as the three-year old Bulgarian investigations into his poisoning has turned up no leads or suspects.

Mr. Gebrev conceded that there may have been two hypothetical reasons why he might have been targeted. One was his company’s exports of specialized defense-related equipment to Ukraine, which he said he conducted in strict compliance with Bulgarian and European regulations. Another hypothesis, he conceded, was possible interest by Russia in a weapons manufacturing plant he controlled that was seen as strategic importance to Bulgaria and NATO.

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19 Comments

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1. ROY STANDLEY - February 9, 2019

Is there information of USA events?

Reply

2. muchandr - February 11, 2019

Yes! Finally a connection to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella

Reply

3. Yura Timoshenko - February 15, 2019

So you are saying a group of professional military operatives from Russia could not kill a retired ex-coalleague who already served time in Russia way back? Even using a military grade nerve gas? Salmonella is more dangerous than Russian military intelligence according to your reports)

Wagner Mercenaries With GRU-issued Passports: Validating SBU’s Allegation

January 30, 2019

By Bellingcat Investigation Team

Translations: Русский

At a Monday press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, the Ukrainian Security Agency (SBU) announced that it had intercepted passenger manifests from Russian MoD-chartered airliners transporting mercenaries working for Wagner, a Russian private military company (PMC). The manifests, involving flights from Russia to several African and Middle-East destinations in the latter half of 2018, allegedly transported a total of 1012 mercenaries to Sudan, CAR and other African destinations.

The most explosive allegation made at the press conference by the SBU was that PMC Wagner’s mercenaries were issued Russian international travel passports in sequential batches by — and this is crucial — a single Moscow-based passport desk that had issued fake identity papers to undercover GRU officers Mishkin/Petrov and Chepiga/Boshirov.

Bellingcat first reported in September 2018 that this passport desk, known as Central Migration Office Unit 770-001 (“Unit 770001”), is routinely used to issue domestic passports to GRU undercover officers, such as the Salisbury poisoning suspects and two unrelated GRU undercover officers indicted by Montenegro over the alleged 2016 coup attempt in that country. Bellingcat and other organizations later established that this passport desk also issued Russian passports to a handful of foreign VIPs freshly bestowed with Russian citizenship, people such as French actor Gerard Depardieu.

Bellingcat has subsequently discovered that this same office had also issued passports to Russian civilians with links to the Russian Ministry of Defense — either through direct employment or via a close family member.

The SBU’s allegations are significant in that, if proven true, they would implicate the Russian government in not simply tolerating Wagner’s overseas military operations (which are actually illegal under Russian law), but in being actively involved in the facilitation of such black ops.

Furthermore, the fact that (apart from a handful of foreign VIPs), Unit 770001 has only been known to issue passports to people linked to the Ministry of Defense, the mass issuance of passports to PMC mercenaries by this same office would provide the strongest documentary linkage so far between Russia’s MoD and the illegal private army.

Given the high stakes raised by the SBU’s allegations, Bellingcat set out to independently verify these explosive claims.

Following the press conference, the SBU published three sets of lists of alleged PMC Wagner mercenaries. The first two lists included names, dates, and places of birth, as well as domestic and international passport numbers of sixteen alleged Wagner mercenaries, seven of whom were said to hold international passports issued in one “series” in 2015, and another nine with such issued in 2017. Notably, the lists included names with birth places from all over Russia, while the passport issuing authority — in all cases, SBU claimed — was the Moscow-based Unit 770001.

The third list, which was the longest, included only the names and birth dates of 149 alleged PMC Wagner mercenaries, who, the SBU claimed, had been deployed in Sudan in late 2018 and early 2019. SBU specified that the first two lists were subsets of the larger list of 149 people.

Verification

As Bellingcat does not have access to the database of international passports issued by passport unit 770001, it was impossible to immediately validate the SBU’s claim that these alleged mercenaries had received passports from this agency. The passport numbers were consistent with those identified by us in a number of confirmed GRU undercover officers’ passports, and the sequence of numbers for the two years fit into the timeline of other passports issued before and after 2015 as previously reviewed by Bellingcat.

The SBU’s allegations could be substantially confirmed via indirect means. We started by taking a random sample of names from the first and second SBU list, which included both international and domestic passport numbers of alleged PMC mercenaries.

As part of our investigation into the Salisbury poisoning suspects, we had acquired a copy of a leaked database of domestic air travel bookings in Russia dating from 2014 to 2016. This database, which can be acquired from a number of torrent sites and database vendors in Russia, has proven to be accurate but not comprehensive, as it does not necessarily include all air-travel in this period.

We attempted to locate several randomly selected domestic passport numbers from the SBU’s list in the air-travel database. We also tried to find names from the long list of 149 names that did not contain passport data; in this case we searched for full name and birthdate matches.

Out of eleven attempts, we were successful in finding seven of the names from the SBU’s list in the domestic air-travel data.  Of these, three were matched by (domestic) passport numbers, and four by full name and birth date.

A startling observation from the resulting dataset was one destination that overlapped in all of the domestic air-travel records for the seven individuals involved. All seven had a very limited air-travel history, but each had taken at least one flight with the destination being Pashkovsy airport.

In many cases, Pashkovsky was the only destination they had traveled to. Typically, the travel pattern included travel from Moscow or St. Petersburg to Pashkovsky, preceded by a flight to Moscow or St. Petersburg from a different Russian region, typically overlapping with the person’s home area.

Pashkovsky is the main airport serving Russia’s southern city of Krasnodar. Notably, PMC Wagner’s main training camp is based at the village of Molkino, as reported by Russian investigative media. Molkino is approximately a 30-minute drive from Pashkovsky.

Notably, we were able to identify flights on which several of the persons identified by the SBU had traveled to or from Pashkovsky airport in a group.

As Russians traveling on domestic flights typically use their internal passports, rather than their international travel passports, we could not directly verify the SBU’s claim that the listed mercenaries were issued international passport numbers from the 770001 Unit in Moscow.

However, this allegation was indirectly confirmed when we checked if any travelers having international passports from the same number series as those on the SBU lists had made domestic trips using such documents. Indeed, we identified two such travelers. Notably, they had both travelled (only) between St. Petersburg and Pashkovsky on such passports. St. Petersburg is the home base of U.S.-sanctioned Yevgeny Prigozhin, commonly known in media parlance as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin is a catering provider to Russia’s Ministry of Defense and other government bodies and is widely believed to be the financial sponsor of PMC Wagner.

Our finding indirectly validates the SBU’s allegation that the names identified at the press conference belong to PMC Wagner staff, and that at least some people among PMC Wagner operatives have passports from the same office that issued GRU undercover identity papers.

Previous links between PMC Wagner and GRU were evidenced by an intercepted phone call between a high-ranking GRU officer and the chief executive and nom-de-guerre-namesake of the PMC, Dmitry Utkin, a.k.a. “Wagner”. The GRU officer on the call had previously been identified conclusively by Bellingcat as Col. Oleg Ivannikov, a staff GRU officer who was deployed in 2014 to Eastern Ukraine and was involved with procuring the Russian Buk missile launcher that downed MH17. The call’s content strongly suggests that Wagner’s CEO Utkin takes direct orders and reports to Col. Ivannikov.

Using the same 2014-2016 database, we checked domestic travel records for both Col. Ivannikov and Dmitry Utkin. Both of them made trips almost exclusively to/from Pashkovsky airport.

The limited analysis and verification conducted by Bellingcat on the data presented by SBU with publicly available leaked records is sufficient to conclude that the persons listed are indeed mercenaries contracted by, or otherwise associated with, PMC Wagner. Our limited-scope audit of names and passport numbers confirm that the referenced persons do exist, and that many of them had travel patterns that can be plausibly explained with traveling from their home regions, via either Moscow or St. Petersburg, to the main training camp of Wagner near Krasnodar.

While we cannot unequivocally endorse SBU’s assertion that the issuance of the sequential international passports to these mercenaries proves their linkage to GRU, it is certain that no such mass issuance of passports from the central passport issuance agency at the federal level (which is not routinely used for issuance of civilian passports) could take place without the active endorsement of the state apparatus, if not necessarily the GRU. However, the rest of the available evidence, including the audio intercepts and the multiple travel of a senior GRU officer known to be in a commanding position to Wagner’s commander and the location of the PMC’s training camp, strongly supports the hypothesis that PMC Wagner is indeed a proxy and serves at the command of the Ministry of Defense, and in particular the GRU.

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30 Comments

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1. muchandr - February 5, 2019

Yawn, I googled in Russian and pikabu’s was the first site that came up. You might as well claim that reddit or imgur are full of “kremlinbots”. If you actually bothered to read the page, you will notice this famous GRU agent among the people whose passport was issued by the same office

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%98%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%8F_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87

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- Anon - February 9, 2019

Yawn, Olgino again. It’s Varlamov’s internal passport, not international travel passport, that appears to have been issued by unit 77001, not unit 770001 (extra zero). Nothing to see here, move along.

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2. muchandr - February 11, 2019

Nope. I immediately wondered since when do they dub internal passports to English and what do you know, they don’t

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_passport_of_Russia

So, it is not an internal passport. Since the only evidence for the Unit 770001 I’ve seen is the passport Depardieu is waving around and everybody else says it should be Unit 77001 instead, the easiest explanation is that Depardieu’s is some kind of special make. Maybe they did make it by hand and made a typo? It appears to be the only one where the label and seal of issuing office occupies the whole centerfold, giving some credence to this theory. Everybody else had the number of the issuing office under the laminate on the same page with the photograph, including a sample from 2012 predating Depardieu’s by a year. Could also be yet another botched SBU fake, too.

The Olgino stuff is getting old, you know. That company, IRA that was in Olgino is now closed and the whole interference in US elections thing is being contested by them in a US court. It looks a lot more like click-and-bait business looking to monetize ads. So, it ain’t over till it is over.

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3. muchandr - February 11, 2019

Nope. I immediately wondered since when do they dub internal passports to English and what do you know, they don’t

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_passport_of_Russia

So, it is not an internal passport. Since the only evidence for the Unit 770001 I’ve seen is the passport Depardieu is waving around and everybody else says it should be Unit 77001 instead, the easiest explanation is that Depardieu’s is some kind of special make. Maybe they did make it by hand and made a typo? It appears to be the only one where the label and seal of issuing office occupies the whole centerfold, giving some credence to this theory. Everybody else had the number of the issuing office under the laminate on the same page with the photograph, including a sample from 2012 predating Depardieu’s by a year.

The Olgino stuff is getting old, you know. That company, IRA that was in Olgino is now closed and the whole interference in US elections thing is being contested by them in a US court. It looks a lot more like click-and-bait business looking to monetize ads. So, it ain’t over till it is over.